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The where and why of recycling plastic in Ontario

You drain the last drop of water from a plastic bottle and chuck it in the recycling bin. Beyond the imminent curbside pickup, do you know where that bottle goes?

It might travel further than you’d think.

The question came up last week when reports emerged that a Whitby recycler illegally shipped “tons of garbage” amongst containers of mixed plastic to the Philippines. The business owner denied sending the garbage, but a basic question lingered all the same: We’re shipping recycling to the Philippines?

The business of recycling plastic in Ontario is a valuable endeavour involving non-governmental organizations and multimillion-dollar companies competing for technological supremacy and coveted municipal contracts. While most of that recycling stays in the country for processing, some of it gets shipped abroad, most often to the United States.

Carol Hochu, president of the Canadian Plastics Industry Association (CPIA), said the main reason some plastics are shipped abroad is a lack of capacity to handle it in Canada. “It requires significant capital investment and the building of infrastructure. We are not quite there yet,” Hochu said.

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According to Environment Canada, 143 Canadian companies exported “hazardous recyclable material” — which includes plastics — to other countries in 2012, the most recent year with available data. That represented 10,971 shipments, 94 per cent of which went to the U.S. Three years earlier, in 2009, 98 per cent of 7,424 shipments went to our southern neighbour.

Laurie Borg, president of Ajax recycler NexCycle and board member of the Canadian Plastics Industry Association, said most rigid plastics, like bottles and large containers, are dealt with in-province.

“The biggest challenge is plastic film,” said Borg, referring to grocery bags and plastic wrap. “It’s just way harder to process than a rigid plastic.”

For that reason, Borg said, plastic films are more likely to be exported to developing countries, because the labour for manual sorting is much cheaper. “If you can have cheap labour do the manual sorting, that’s what goes on,” he said.

The process of recycling plastic in Ontario starts at the city level. Municipalities collect plastics through the blue-bin recycling program, a $200-million-per-year venture managed by the not-for-profit agency Stewardship Ontario.

Plastic collected by cities is sorted into bales and then sold on the open market, said Stewardship Ontario spokesperson Alastair Harris-Cartwright in an email.

In Toronto, like other cities, agreements to buy this plastic are doled out through a bidding system, according to Jim Harnum, Toronto’s general manager of solid waste management services.

Martin Vogt, president of EFS Plastics, a recycler in Listowel, Ont., said there are two main camps vying for municipal plastic contracts: recycling companies and brokers, the latter of which simply buy the plastic to sell it again at a profit, rather than process it themselves. Vogt said that, in his experience, brokers are the ones who typically ship it abroad.

“The problem is the municipalities don’t care if they’re selling it to a broker who ships it overseas,” he said. “Whoever wins the bid gets the material.”

Vogt also manages one of two Ontario firms to process films and mixed plastic and create resin pellets for new products. Though declining to go into detail, Vogt said he has developed technology to process the harder-to-sort plastics, and plans to soon install a second production line.

His biggest concern is the predictability of supply. Most Ontario municipalities — Toronto included — don’t offer supply guarantees with their plastic contracts: “I would like to see volume agreements,” he said. “We invest millions of dollars here.”

Hochu said the CPIA believes curbing plastics exports would be a “wise” use of local resources. “We believe as an industry that local recycling is essential environmentally and economically for the future of the industry,” she said.

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